Makoko In Photos: A Floating Slum In The Heart Of Lagos

Lagos is the commercial capital of the biggest economy in Africa. The city is home to a burgeoning tech scene, the country's film industry, known as Nollywood, and is the base for most of Nigeria’s biggest corporate powerhouses. But across the Third Mainland Bridge, between the mainland and Victoria Island, the high-priced home of government officials and company executives, sits the floating slum of Makoko.

Tens of thousands of people live in the sprawling grid of houses built on stilts above the water, balancing on rickety planks between dwellings. There, residents steer long wooden canoes to get around through narrow canals to visit shops, go to work, and attend school or church. Children start steering their own boats around age 7.

“We love to live on the water,” resident Anthony Shemeun, 50, said through a translator. Like most of his neighbors, he was born and brought up in Makoko. “Just like fish wouldn’t survive on land, we couldn’t survive if we weren’t here.”

But as Lagos continues to get richer and expand, that goal is getting harder to hang on to. In the past, city authorities have evicted the residents from their homes, often with as little as three days warning, to make way for new developments, leaving thousands homeless.

“They call them illegal occupants,” says Agbodemu Ishola, a local politician and activist, who has often staged protests to try to stop the demolitions. He has sometimes been injured doing so.

“They say that Lagos is going to be this new ‘megacity,’ but they didn’t include us in their plans,” he says. “Everyone, rich or poor, should be considered.”